Thursday, November 15, 2012

10.0.11 released, and rides off into the sunset

Please give 10.0.11 a proper sendoff by downloading it and trying it out; this is finally the last release of 10.x, as plainly stated in its Release Notes. The changesets include a fix for issue 130. Assuming no showstoppers during its life, it will be unsupported after January 2013. It served us well and now it is time to let it rest.

17.0 is getting some last minute fixes. Issue 188 is fixed, but I am discovering what appears to be a moderate performance regression on multiprocessor Power Macs on certain sites and I suspect changes in JavaScript locking (10.x uses native OS X locks; 17 uses NSPR locks) due to Shark showing the browser spending a massive amount of time in semaphore wait. This issue does not affect single-processor Macs, so we can ship this,actually, the larger issue also affects them too, see the subsequent post but I'd like to fix it if possible prior to release. If NSPR locks are at fault, then we might want to purge them from the browser entirely (or cause them to stub out into OS X libkern), but I'm just going to focus on JavaScript first since that is the difference between 10 and 17. If I can't find a way to easily remedy it, we will simply ship without it for the moment since the sites do work; they're just slower than they ought to be (iFixit is a particularly egregious example). Remember, this only makes a difference if your Mac has more than one CPU. ETA for 17 RC is Saturday.

Also, thanks to Chris and all our localizers for having installers ready for our release next week! Great work!